I know, I know don’t kill us, it has been quite some time since we did our monthly exercise. But don’t worry, we’re going to make up for it as we have decided to treat you to 4 exercises in the month of August!
To kick off the first of our August Monthly Exercises, we decided to start with an exercise we found through EquineTuition on Instagram. This is a great account to follow if you’re looking for something different to try with your horse.
We’ve been doing quite a good bit of jumping recently, with both of us moving up in the heights, so it was great to do an exercise that made us focus on the more technical side of jumping for a change. This was a great exercise to get us working on tightening up those turns after a fence.
The Set Up:
You will need 4 sets of wings, and 8 poles. We set all fences to small verticals at 60cm to begin with. Height doesn’t really play a part in this exercise, but if you wish to increase it as the exercise progresses and if your horse wants more of a challenge then go for it!
See the diagram for the layout in the arena.
How to Ride it:
This exercise should be ridden as follows:
- Starting on the left right, go down over your related distance
- After the second jump, ride to the jump closest to you on the diagonal closest making sure to turn right on landing and loop back around to your related distance. Make sure you’re ready for this turn by sitting up on landing and ensuring to land on the correct lead.
- Go back down over your related distance on the right rein
- Ride to the jump on the diagonal to your right and land on the left rein, again making sure to prepare for the turn by sitting up on landing
So that’s how you’re supposed to ride it but we ended up having so much more fun with this layout.
With the placement of the jumps you can pretty much take whatever line you like to any of the fences. We played around with coming off the fence into the diagonals, popping from fence to fence on the dogleg and combining it altogether to make a mini course.
The distances between the jumps makes it easy to make a last minute decision on which jump you’re going to take which is a great way of testing your horse’s listening skills.
The Verdict:
This was by far an extremely fun exercise, it was great seeing both horse sit back & wait for direction from their riders, whereas a few months ago we both would of battled to get them to listen to us let alone slow down taking those tight turns.
We would highly recommend this exercise for jump off practice, we’d recommend keeping the jumps more on the small side. There’s no need to have them at mad crazy heights – keeping a controlled pace & steady rhythm is everything you need to be looking for in this exercise.
Give it a go and let us know how you got on! Be sure to check out Instagram for our videos of us giving this a go!
Thanks for reading, & keep an eye out next Sunday for our next instalment,
Darielle & Orla
No Bucking Way 